setzman's Journal: Once you try 2GB you never want less

(Athlon 64 3500+) PF Usage still 225MB running just IE, Google video player, and Yahoo messenger. Feels pretty damn smooth, Windows XP that is. But damn, I can remember running Win98 with,hell, maybe 256MB and having the same "feel". WTF!? Fucking software has just exploded. And not just Windows. Tried running Suse 10 on my P2 333 w/256MB. Fucking sucked, slow-ass POS. Felt like I did when I was playing with an old Redhat distro on my 486, about 6 years ago, or like at the local community college where they tried Win95 on 486s with 8MB ram-which depending on what software you had wouldn't necessary be a bad experience-but in their case-it sucked.

Try a lean BSD

[jawtheshark]

OpenBSD or NetBSD work just fine on older machines. Take a lightweight window manager and enough memory and it will work just fine. Of course, I have 4Gigs of RAM in this machine, but well, ehm, current usage is only 419Megs and I have a fuckload of stuff running.

It's not just the OS

[winkydink]

I run right around 1GB Commit Charge steady state. Right now that includes:

Firefox 100Mb
Outlook 66Mb (for corporate calendaring)
Thunderbird 63Mb
Zone Alarm firewall 41Mb
PGP Tray 36Mb

A couple of Word windows, Yahoo IM, a Jabber client, 4 PuTTY windows, MS Active Sync, 2 turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree.